Impasse
by FireFairy219
Summary: I had no choice. It was kill or be killed; succeed and live or fail and die. Fate was fast approaching, mere minutes away, and I revelled in the in-between time. Oneshot.


Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. And sadly, I don't own Draco Malfoy either.

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><p><strong>IMPASSE<strong>

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><p>I was walking across the hallway at a steady pace, causing my hollow footsteps to resound loudly on the marble.<p>

_Pitter pat, pitter pat_ the pattern went.

It was just about the biggest certainty in my life at the moment, and I clung to the sound as if it was the last thing in life I would ever hear... which might not be so far-fetched a statement, I ironically noted.

_Click clack, click clack. _My sanctuary.

No, not even the dawn of tomorrow or the prestige of the name Malfoy was certain anymore. He had made sure of that.

In fact, the only thing to keep me sane was the fact that my feet were pouncing on the floor and that therefore gravity still was in order, even though all sense of that latter seemed to have left me as well. It was the last thread attached to the world of sanity that hadn't snapped yet, though I suspected that it was wearing down just as well as the others had, at the same rate time was running out. It was pure logic; they all did.

I didn't miss a beat, frantic to keep up the even rhythm, not even when the hallway came at an end. After all, hallways like these could go on forever and ever and there was no real ending. Not for me anyway. I was free in the moment but trapped in it all.

My feet turned and the other side of the corner revealed a new part of the same hallway. (Well, there was a surprise.) I numbly followed it.

My unseeing eyes looked on to register it void of any other life but my own. And it's not that I hadn't been watching and listening for any foreign noises – in fact, I had been walking around for twenty minutes already since I left the (relative) safety of my dorm and started to roam the castle – but it wasn't until now that they could focus enough to grasp that fact.

No, not a single life form had dared cross my path towards destruction. It was just me and the hallway and the lovely _pitterpats_, seeing as any life with the slightest inkling of common sense instinctively recognises danger and shies away from it. Except when it is bound to him, of course, in which case there is no way out.

I didn't know which one I was even occupying at the moment, but it didn't matter. _Nothing_ mattered because everything was the same – everything, except for everything else – and I had taken these detours for countless times before that they were etched in my subconscious like the Mark. Currently, it was leading me to my destination on auto pilot.

In an attempt to assuage the imminent insanity, the non-operating part of my mind endeavoured to think of a time when everything was different, better, good. Unfortunately, I found that I had a hard time remembering the years before this one; the carefree years I so desperately craved.

They were repressed by the reality of foreboding and war, and by the looming presence of Death.

I tried my best to conjure up that long-gone sensation of happiness – or something remotely positive at all – in the same way I would reminisce to produce a Patronus Charm. To no avail, though; the memories seemed to be erased. (They weren't, of course, because no one would bother to _obliviate_ the entirety of my life up till the initiation. That would've only made it easier for me, and he did not want to go easy on his minions. _Struggle_, he claimed, _makes you a man_. I bitterly add the left out truths: _as long as we obey and effect and don't think for ourselves_) They were suppressed by the new ones that I can't seem to escape from, like a new film had been pasted on top of them, disabling them.

What I wouldn't give to recall something of the good old days.

Well, I could remember everything vividly like a magical photograph like I always could, but I couldn't _feel_ it.

I could replay the memory of my first day at Hogwarts, all the times I rode a broomstick and was on top of the world, each time my parents sent me tons of sweets and made my Housemates jealous, the time when that stupid Weasel spewed out slugs when his hex backfired after I called the brightest witch of our age a Mudblood, the swelling bubble of pride when I bested said Mudblood in Defense Against The Dark Arts, the first time I slept with Parkinson, the priceless facial expressions of Potter and his gang when I taunted them, winning the House Cup, _everything_. But I felt a dull throbbing where happiness, smugness, wonder and smiles should have been.

Because they were inferior to the memories of when my father _crucio'd_ me for showing fear (_It is a sign of weakness and Malfoys_, he hissed, _are not weak_), the frightful initiation and the slithering snake that suddenly adorned my painful arm, the sight of him on a mere metre's distance and the matter of life or death in suppressing the shudders, the Death Eaters at the Manor who discussed their latest kills as if it were normal over tea and biscuits, the worry for her only son in my mother's eyes when she knew she would be _avada'd_ if he perceived it, the endless and fruitless visits to the seventh floor, and the twinkle in Dumbledore's eyes that I am supposed to extinguish, murder, _annihilate_.

I slightly faltered in my step, slightly lost my sanity, and turned yet another corner.

It would be over soon, though, I coached myself. Death was approaching steadily, and in it, I hoped to find release from this hell and shell I was ashamed to call my life.

Death. Something I always reckoned wouldn't be an issue until I was at least a hundred years of age – not sixteen. Not when there was so much I wanted to do still. Not _now_.

But I had no choice. It was kill or be killed; succeed and live or fail and die. The ultimatum – 'choice' is incapable of covering the impact – was never uttered out loud or was always embellished with pretty words (_think of your family, boy; they would be so proud if you were to tread in your father's footsteps... and you wouldn't want to sully the Malfoy name, would you?_) but everyone saw it for what it was. Besides, you don't go against a man with the power and absence of conscience such as him and expect to come out unscathed. A lesson he'd made sure I witnessed once or twice before I frolicked off to school, to that pseudo-reality even I couldn't convince myself of anymore.

Live or die, Draco.

I guess that if I were a courageous and noble person – a Gryffindor – that I would choose to do the _right_ thing and possibly save this world from impending war and massacre. But I wasn't, because I was just a boy with a mother whose life I feared for and a Slytherin: selfish by nature and uncaring of the greater good. I cared only about securing her safety.

Thus, I had no choice.

I stopped walking – the _clickclacks_ and their sweet echoes died away – and stared at the wall I had memorised in such great detail that the small cracks had haunted my dreams along with everything else.

Time had run out apparently; though for the life of me, I had no idea where it had gone.

This was it then.

The end.

The end of the hallway, my life as I knew it, Hogwarts, the last shred of innocence I had left, the thread of sanity that was milliseconds away from snapping and would plunge me into blissful madness, of chance of survival and of me.

I took a deep breath and opened the intricate door to the Room of Lost Things my mind had convinced to appear.

Fate embraced me with open arms.

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><p><strong>AN**: I am aware that, after he is unable to kill Dumbledore, that he is still in this impasse, but at this point, he doesn't know yet that he won't kill him. Review? :) It's my first attempt at a Harry Potter fic.


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